hot patching

[Pratap Chakravarthy <pratap.chakravarthy@xxxxxxxxx>]

hello all,
    Can you please tell me the feasibility of hot patching in an
operating system like linux and if possible please provide me with any details or pointers on that.
    I saw in the sun's web site that they have provided hot patching
in their solaris 8. How far it is reliable.

what is hot patching ?
    It is nothing but replacing a function present in the memory "on fly".In usual cases suppose
there is  a  bug in the kernel code, that bug has to be removed and then compiled and linked to get the image [kernel image],which is then booted. Here in hot patching the debuged function has to
be compiled. Then it is linked with the kernel without rebooting the system, on the fly.

I dont know whether this facility is really required for linux. But for any OS developer, this
tool is a required one.

To some extent i succeed in doing a hot patch for a proprietary OS. I wanted to do that
            in linux also. Your help is very much needed.

thanks in advance
pratap